An enterprise computer system, for example an Oracle Exalogic middleware machine, can include a plurality of application hosts and managed servers which receive requests from external clients that are then processed by hosted applications. In some environments, traffic directors receive the requests from an external load balancer, for example via an Ethernet over InfiniBand (EoIB) network, and route the requests to applications, for example via a high-speed internal InfiniBand (IB) network.
However, if a hard partition is used to route requests between particular traffic director instances and application hosts, then an application which needs to communicate with another application at a different host generally cannot communicate its requests completely within the internal IB network, but must instead communicate the requests via the external load balancer and the slower EoIB network. This need to communicate via the external load balancer negatively impacts the speed with which hosted applications can communicate with one another, and reduces overall system performance.